Moving at the Speed of Government

"While there is more work to be done, the team is operating with private sector velocity and effectiveness, and will continue their work to improve and enhance the website in the weeks and months ahead." -- The Obama White House, 2013

"Moving at the speed of government." -- Rudy Giuliani, 2007

There wasn't a whole lot to remember about Giuliani's short-lived effort to become the 2008 GOP nominee -- but that line has stuck with me, because it perfectly encapsulates two things. The first is the obvious point that government moves slowly, when it can be bothered to move at all. The second is that Giuliani was riffing on the old UPS slogan, "Moving at the speed of business." Politicians like to claim they can play CEO, and whip the massive federal machinery into Ludicrous Speed -- but the promises always fall flat.

President Obama has promised to fix what's wrong with Obamacare at "private sector velocity." So to paraphrase another former New York City mayor, how's he doin'?

If you want to count erecting a "Potemkin website," then Obama has done an admirable job, as my friend and colleague Ed Driscoll noted last week. HealthCare.gov works to the extent that it can show you what you might pay and what subsidies you might receive, but the back end -- the part which actually completes the process of selling insurance -- still suffers from what physicists call "a total existence failure."

Somehow, this is what New York Times columnist and former paid Enron advisor Paul Krugman describes as "past the hump." "It's going to be OK," he told Business Insider on Friday. That's a lot of faith in a half-built computer system which is supposed to have people -- four million people -- with actual fully-functioning health insurance by January 1.

From Grigory Potemkin's original fake villages, built to impress Catherine II, to Joseph Goebbels's "big lie" campaign against Europe's Jews, big-government nomenklatura have always shown amazing ingenuity when it comes to fooling people. Not that I'm actually comparing Krugman to Goebbels, mind you. Goebbels was a true believer in a particularly nasty statist ideology, while Krugman is a highly paid opinion writer for the New York Times.

But the main problem behind Obamacare right now isn't smartphones from a dying Canadian manufacturer of obsolete computer storage media. It's those pesky 834 files, which carry your vital information from HealthCare.gov to your insurer.